


limitations.

by ridorana



Series: i thought i heard your voice in the thunder [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: M/M, story on hiatus until i finish the remake.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 08:27:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9376730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ridorana/pseuds/ridorana
Summary: (hiatus)I ain't scared of lightningCome on and do your worstIf they gave degreesFor cheating destinyThen manI got a first





	

The death toll from Bahamut rises with each passing day. Rabanastre reeks of corpses, mottled with blood and burns, dragged from the ruin. Imperials, beastmasters, engineers - but no sky pirate, and no viera. Plumes of black, thick smoke bleed from the fallen war beast and permeate Rabanastre, as if it hasn’t seen enough already.

It haunts the streets and alleyways, a dark and hovering specter. Ashe has deemed the air unsafe to breathe, and as the new Queen, implements her first mark of order by sending the citizens underground. She does what she can to protect her people.

Lowtown’s snaking passageways stretch far beneath the city, further than even Vaan knew, much to his chagrin. All Penelo can do is shrug and say, “Even Lowtown has its secrets.” It does nothing to quell his incredulity. Word has it that these tunnels reach as far as Nalbina, used in the past for the slave trade Dalan would speak of sometimes. 

Rabanastre takes cover beneath the desert, but it’s Vaan who pushes against the constant flow of bodies shuffling deeper into Lowtown like a current of mindless zombies, until he reaches a secret that he’s sure only he knows. 

The trap door opens in Migelo’s shop. It’s deafeningly quiet, abandoned in haste, potions and remedies strewn about the floor. Vaan clambers up and wastes no time. It won’t be long before Penelo notices he’s gone. 

He slams the trap door behind him and runs.

The smoke outside pulls tears from the corners of Vaan’s eyes the closer he gets to the gates yet he pushes forward. It burns his throat, and tastes of ash. Bahamut’s death will not be swift. He pictures Balthier and Fran, somewhere deep within its corpse, lost, smothered, injured,

_ dying. _ 

The ashes engulf the Westersand, turning the golden desert into a bleak grey. Vaan unravels the sash ‘round his waist, ties it in front of his mouth, and runs along the dunes. Bahamut is massive, even robbed of all its glory, burning alive on enemy land. The heat emanating from its fiery core singes his skin like an entite.

_Balthier! Fran!_ he yells, and yells, and yells. Over and over and over again, he yells their names. He takes five long paces to the left, calls again. Five more paces, again. He repeats.  

 _Balthier, Fran! Where are you?! Balthier!_ the smoke claws its way down his throat and he chokes on the final syllable.   

He won’t leave them out there.

A distant explosion within Bahamut’s northern tip pushes Vaan backwards and he’s coughing up thick, black soot. He’s on his back now, heaved upon the sands. Or perhaps on his side. Maybe his front - he can’t tell. The world spins before him, and he calls out their names, voice cracking above the fire’s roar and swallowed by the sand against his mouth.

He imagines Balthier burning, shielding Fran’s body from an imploded glossair ring spewing fire deep within the maze of the monolith. Vaan chokes, before giving in to the suffocating blackness barbing at his lungs. 

 

—

 

Balthier doesn’t know how long it’s been. It’s quiet, deep within the wretched beast Bahamut, and he counts time by the steady breaths Fran makes draped over his lap. Surrounding them is a darkness that rivals that of Giruvegan. They are, as far as he’s concerned, suspended in oblivion. Briefly he wonders how his cursed father dealt with such darkness, all Cid’s time spent in it - before he realizes Cid was indeed completely fucking insane,  therefore having never, in fact, dealt with it at all. 

The fallen sky pirate wonders if he will become mad too, and realizes Fran - were she awake (and could she hurry up with that?) - would admonish his melodrama. He won’t budge until she wakes. He will die there with her, if he must, melodrama be damned. 

He’s leaning against something hard and jagged but can’t find the strength to move. The thought passes him in every slow, shuddering breath Fran makes - they may die here, indeed. The thought is infuriating - to die in a blaze of glory as pirates-turned-heroes is one thing, to slowly starve to death in the dark surrounded by charred curs and corpses is another.  

Idly he strokes Fran’s hair, and finds it anchors him somewhat. He closes his eyes, decides perhaps now is a good time for another nap - someone will rescue them, eventually, probably, hopefully. 

 _ Balthier! Fran!  _ 

The voice is far, and Balthier could very well be imagining it. His eyes snap open though all that greets him is black. Is that… Vaan? 

 _ Balthier! Fran, where are you?! _ 

Balthier stirs in a frenzy, leaning forward and shouting back into the void. “Here! Vaan, is that you? We’re here!” 

 _ Balthier! Fran! _ 

“Here, I said! By the mist, I said here!” His voice lands tinnily on whatever surrounds them and the silence following makes his ears ring. 

Nothing answers Balthier for ages—he releases a heavy sigh, leans back against the metal scraping into his marred back, and counts Fran’s breaths again.

For now, it is all he can do. 

—

 

Vaan wakes in Lowtown, heavy-lidded and light-headed. Blonde pigtails, feathers, a worried lower lip—the familiar, hovering sight of Penelo greets him and even in his daze he can see the relief lift the weight from her shoulders. She’s crying, arms thrown over him, and Vaan hears Old Dalan’s voice somewhere nearby.  

“Lucky you are, m’boy, that you’re alive. A few more minutes out there and you’d've been like the rest of them.”

It’s heavy and hollow and piercing all at once, the realization that he came back empty handed. Somewhere deep within Vaan the wound he had only barely begun patching in the wake of Reks’ death tears open again, wrought and ugly, to render him breathless.He stares upwards at the frayed, lazy crests of wires dripping with magicite lanterns throughout Lowtown's innards, and yells at the unfairness of it all until he can no more.

 

——

It burns still, a week later. Rabanastre’s citizens have resorted to even the children for help now – they run back and forth from Giza during the rains, bringing water to douse the smoldering metal. 

Penelo and Vaan stand alongside their neighbors under the clawing shadow of the monolith, and cast water magicks until their throats burn and hands creak under the strain.

“Useless,” a Dalmascan spits next to them, throwing a water basket aside. “Whoever isn’t out of here already is long dead.” 

Vaan’s jaw clenches and he isn’t responsible for what happens next. The impact of his fist against the man’s face is hard enough to hear cartilage break beneath his knuckles, and the man falls to the ground. It’s quiet now, tension so tight in the air Penelo could do acrobatics along it. She pulls him back, a gesture not so difficult as Vaan realizes what he’s done. Everyone is staring, eyes accusing and scared. Blood speckles the sand and the man writhes, holding his face, gurgling curses.  

An unreadable expression veils Vaan’s features, but Penelo is already casting a healing spell despite her exhaustion.

The desert feels so, so hot, suddenly. He can’t find it in himself to apologize, because he isn’t sorry. Bahamut still burns, and so does he. Wordlessly he stalks away, until he disappears behind a hard crevice of Bahamut’s fallen steel to begin casting again.  

Penelo finds him later that night in the Strahl, docked safely in the Aerodrome. He’s sitting at the cockpit and he doesn’t stir when she approaches, not even when she places cautious hands on his shoulders rife with tension. His skin is hot as if he, too, burns. Her voice is gentle, and she treats him like glass that would shatter into jagged edges again. 

“They’re out there still,” she says, nearly a whisper. “I just know it.” 

The hard line settling across Vaan’s lips does not falter, asif he would crumble at the slightest touch. Silence meets Penelo and, though disturbing to her, she leaves him in the captain’s chair of the Strahl where she found him, where she finds him every day. She has pieced him back together before. She can now. 

Or at least, she will try. It is what she does.

——

Slowly but surely Balthier and Fran persevere in the thick black of Bahamut’s mocking maze. They work in a seamless silence, hyper-aware of each other’s movements, falters, breaths.  

“Once we’re out of here, my dear, where would you like to go first?” Balthier’s voice is ragged and low, throat singed by heat. It’s been so long since they’ve had water; even Balthier is unsure of if his own question is ironic or not.

Fran limps, her stilettos long-abandoned. She is quiet, and for a long time all he can hear is the stumble of their hands along the walls leading them deeper into the dark. Balthier thinks she ignores him for favor of saving her breath, before she finally says, “Home.” 

Balthier knows her well enough after all these years to tease apart the secrets of her words. In the unforgiving dark that engulfs them, he too thinks of sunbeams weaving through the trees, the playful lilt of birdsong, and dust motes floating in air that smells of honeysuckle and sap.  

“To the Wood it is, then.”

They wander in the darkness still.

 

—

 

Bahamut still burns a low, guttural, scorching burn. It sputters smoke, leaving ugly entrails marring the blue skies above in crude claws of black. Its death is long and Rabanastre watches it with a weary gaze. The stench stretches thickly across the desert and far beyond, but at least Her people are above the ground in the sun again.

From the Sandsea, the Urutan-Yensa arrive at dawn in droves to the smoldering war machine. Their scurrying bodies litter the desert like dust. Bony fingers pick and clink in furious unison as they strip the ship of its scrap metal like scavengers, hundreds of them. Vaan finds it fascinating; the fall of Bahamut has turned Ivalice upside-down, if even the Urutan-Yensa journey from Jagd.

Vaan is content just observing them from his perch atop a jagged cliff, until one lights an explosion mote to break off a chunk of steel. The sound isn’t even that loud, but it shakes Vaan deep in his core as he imagines Balthier and Fran, still in there, somewhere deep and dark.  

 _Enough, Dalmasca has seen enough. No more_ , he thinks. 

His Aeroga spell rips through him like a storm, powerful and beautiful and merciless, and he kills them all. Their frail bones seem to be made of naught but dust as the spell lands with a muted thud across the sand and spreads their remains into the wind. 

When the sand clears after what seems like ages, Bahamut sputters one last oil-fueled cough laced with fire; it is a scorching laugh that leaves Vaan’s eyes watering from more than just the smoke in its wake.  

It’s been two weeks.

 

—

There isn't much Penelo can do to rouse Vaan from his stupor that renders him lifeless and hollow. Still, she tries anyway. He is a shadow of himself. She thinks of Reks when she sees him - rendered still and empty and blank, blank, nothingness. It causes cold ice to twist and coil in the pit of her belly until she can't breathe. She steps out into the sun with him, under a blue sky, cloudless and hanging like a tapestry with the light of the midday sun.

The Estersand is nearly pristine in comparison to its battered western sister, and she drags him along it with light feet, chasing cockatrices and slashing at cactoids. It's something to do, at least, and if Vaan won't sleep or hardly eat, she thinks some fresh air on cleaner sands will at least rouse him to do _one_ of those things after today.

Vaan follows her along the familiar dunes with heavy feet. Exhaustion pulls at the inner corners of his eyes but somehow he forces a grin when she turns to him, beaming as a cockatrice chick bounces along her foot with a chirp. She picks it up and it's nothing but a round, fat ball of feathers and she returns it to its clucking mother. When she turns back to Vaan, her smile fades. He's staring off into the distance, an empty look behind his eyes, and she feels she's lost him again. 

"Come on," Penelo urges, and wraps her fingers around his wrist gauntlet baking in the sun, "I'll race you to the Nebra. Loser has to do the stock check Migelo's been hounding us about." 

She runs ahead and hopes that if she doesn't look over her shoulder, he will follow. She's half-right; after several stretched moments of her legs springing her ahead, she hears him gaining on her. 

In any other situation, Penelo would never let Vaan win. But she feigns her falter for the sake of his smile, and watches him run ahead, until the shimmering crystal blue of the Nebra river greets them both. 

By the time she catches up with him, he's already shed his vest and boots, and is working on unclasping the armor about his shins. It's so hot today, and the river looks so seductively inviting in the heat that causes visions ahead to dance and sway. Penelo can't help but mirror Vaan, and sits down to undo the buckles on her leather boots. She doesn't even have the first one off yet when Vaan dunks himself unabashedly in the water, resurfacing moments later with a refreshed gasp. His warm wet hair clings to his tanned cheekbones and he lets out a breath that Penelo is sure he's been holding for three weeks now. 

"Feels good, huh?" she chuckles, and undoes her braids. Vaan kicks on the sand beneath the water and floats on his back, muscled arms outstretched like wings on either side.

"Yeah," he says back, and it's the first response she's gotten out of him in what feels like hours. He's so quiet lately, as if he has too much to say and no way to say it, the words clumping together in hard knots that catch in his throat. 

She dips her toes in the water and watches him float across the surface like a steady ship on the Naldoan Sea.

That night, for the first time Penelo has seen since the fall of Bahamut, Vaan retreats to the captain's chamber of the Strahl and sleeps for two days.

 

\--

The sun touches Balthier’s skin and he wants to sing. He would, if his throat were not parched as dust. In lieu of that, he shuts his eyes tight in the presence of Dalmasca’s marveled sunrise; too long have they lingered in Bahamut’s corpse, dark as pitch, to be rendered blind now.  

Desert air, dry as bone and laden with the wake of smoke, tears through Balthier’s chapped lips. He swallows it like a starved man. 

Fran’s weight presses heavily into him. He steps and drags her, slowly; she breathes but doesn’t wake,  rendered unconscious by the residual Mist bursting from the vent from which they finally escaped. 

How many fortnights has it been? He does not know. He cannot tell. All he can do is laugh until he cries a hoarse, tearless retch of a sob.

_They live, they live, they live. _

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of inspiration for Balthier and Fran's time in Bahamut is from ColoredInk's Four and Twenty Blackbirds which, in my opinion, is one of the top ten literary masterpieces this very talented fandom produced back during the LiveJournal days. The fic is on AO3, do find it and give it a read. It's amazing. Thank you to 1000Needles for beta-ing :)


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